Wednesday, September 05, 2007

My 1st plastic surgery shoot


I got an assignment to shoot one of the Dr's in the same suite as Dr. Rey of Dr. 90201.

It was a good introduction for me as it was a very quick and easy procedure. I shot a woman getting a saline implant inserted into her upper and lower lips. It's a new procedure and took less than an hour.

The procedure itself was pretty straight forward and mercifully free of blood. *For those with week stomachs do not read on.*

Actually it wasn't bad but I don't want to offend anyone.

The Dr. began with a local anesthetic. Once the woman's face was numb he opened a path into her lip with a scalpel and proceeded to insert a pair of scissors and cut a tunnel through her lip. Once the canal was created he was able to insert the saline implant and inflate it to a predetermined size, kind of like a sleep number mattress.

It was pretty surreal and I was grateful to have a b/w viewfinder to help remove me from the procedure. But you do have to keep peaking with your other eye to get a sense of what's going on.

The biggest challenge was exposure. Once they swing in that intense surgery light you either expose for the Dr. and let the patient go nuclear or expose for the patient and let the room go dark. I had to dial in ND just to shoot around F8.

It was a first for the producer and myself and we kept checking in with each other to make sure we were ok. My audio guy was a season regular on Dr. 9 so this was a walk in the park for him.

My hats off to all you surgery shooters.

2 comments:

j.elliot said...

one starving musician came by to say: you have a much stronger stomach than I.

j.e.

Marshmallow Recipes said...

Thank yyou for sharing